Laser-Plasma Acceleration Laboratory

Rapid progress in the high power laser technology made it possible to have a compact table-top terawatt laser. A high power laser beam from the table-top size can be focused onto a small size and the focused laser beam has an extremely strong electric field, which is strong enough to promptly ionize atoms into a plasma state. In our research group we study the laser matter/plasma interactions intensively. Especially our study is focused on the laser-plasma acceleration research, where the ultrastrong laser electric field is converted into a plasma wave and the plasma wave can accelerate charged particles (especially electrons) to very high relativistic energies (~GeV) over a very short distance (~cm). In this way, the acceleration gradient can be about 1,000 times higher than that of the microwave-based conventional accelerators. We are going to use the high-energy electron beams to generate fs (femto-second) free electron lasers and fs X-ray/gamma-ray pulses by using the Thomson back-scattering scheme. For these studies, we use the 100 TW laser facility at APRI (Advanced Photonics Research Institute) for experimental work and the Linux-based computer cluster system for large-scale laser-plasma simulation /theoretical work. The research results can be used for physics, chemistry, biology, material science, nano-science, etc.